Most reviewers have concentrated on the couple’s wild sexual lives, but their political stupidity arguably ranks higher in the scale of immorality. Until the Second World War, both of these future champions of engaged literature were curiously uninterested in politics. During a stay in Berlin in 1933, Sartre managed to totally ignore the rise of Nazism. Neither of them cared less about the Spanish Civil War or the election of the left-wing Popular Front government in France in 1936.